GMSV shoots some kudos the way of Read/Write Web – Richard is based in Wellington, NZ.

Freeze-frame from the video stream: Just as Robert Scoble is wondering how we will ever keep up with the flow of news on new companies, Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb perform the kind of public service that deserves a salute. They’ve assembled a current snapshot synopsis of the many players working various niches in the online video industry: sharing, intermediaries, search, e-commerce, editing and creation, rich media advertising, P2P, streaming and V-logging. Even those most plugged in to the business must have moments when they can’t quite recall what distinguishes Pixsy from blinkx or whether Vongo is available internationally (it’s not), so this serves not just as a quick catch-up but as a good reference that will grow with reader contributions. It’ll also work as a nice milepost, one of those lists you come back to five years or 10 years down the road for a reminder of how things evolved. Nicely done, folks.

I fly lots. And I mean lots. Hundreds of thousands of miles a year. I’m constantly astounded by how appallingly airlines treat their customers. A group of passengers is now moving – using a blog — to rally support for a Passengers Bill of Rights. This has been needed for sometime – the big Airlines are a law unto themselves.

You can read the full story in the Merc. There is a group of customer-centric carriers that get it (Southwest, Virgin, Air New Zealand). There is another group that don’t – American, United, British Airways…). Those that do get it should get behind the Bill of Rights. Those that don’t are likely to dismiss poor service as “anomalies” and that is the very reason we need a Bill of Rights.

While I’m not sure there is a great deal of synergy with Cisco’s core business, the Five Across acquisition gives Cisco some street cred on the business side of Participatory Platforms. Will be interesting to see how they integrate it.

Cisco delivered the usual corporate patter in explaining the acquisition:

“Cisco believes the network is the platform for organizations to connect with their constituents and for individuals to connect with each other,” said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). “With the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco is taking an important step towards helping its customers evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end-user.”

I’ve always been impressed with what Five Across have been doing in creating communities for big brands. They have a platform that scales. Does this mean Cisco is getting into the Participatory Platforms business though? We’ll have to wait and see.

If you thought social networking was big before, wait till you get a load of this. Rupert Murdoch last week said MySpace makes roughly $25 million a month in online advertising revenue, and that it’s growing every month at an approximate rate of 30 percent per quarter.

And that’s not all. Murdoch added, “”Next year we’ll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN, we’ll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue.”

And an interesting comment on YouTube:

He added that, after Google bought YouTube, it
prevented MySpace access to its content from the video-sharing site.
Murdoch said MySpace then ramped up its video element and now had
roughly 60 or 70 per cent of the number of uploads that YouTube gets.“If
you look at it [YouTube] carefully it’s not a community site. It’s an
experience and it can be quite hypnotic. But how do you monetise it? If
you interrupt the flow of videos with commercials the users will be
over to us or somewhere else pretty quickly,” he added.